Does anyone else find this endearingly cheap? Charmed by the lack of hair physics and any coherent art direction? Wistfully smiling at hands clipping into bodies during cutscenes? Squishing the cheeks of the stupendously ugly characters with nothing behind the eyes? No? Alright.

It's pretty good. If by 'good' I mean brain-destroyingly disjointed and frequently terrible on every level, that isn't the actual moment-to-moment gameplay of the world-class boss fights. Which, coincidentally, I do.

Furi, as a narrative work, does not exist. It is a collection of Resident Evil camera angles, mind-numbing diatribes poorly voice acted by Vanny from FNAF Security Breach and some funky-looking dude with one walk cycle strolling at 1 mile per hour. I know there's supposed to be a story. I know it's trying to have things like 'meaning' and 'symbolism' like other big boy indie games, but there isn't, and it doesn't. I went to town a few months back on Katana Zero's story, a similarly misguided collection of gibberish, but I was very endeared by it. The difference is in the way it's told. Even if it maintains a self-serious facade, Katana Zero presents its story with bright colours, explosions, and other ridiculous bells and whistles. It's, if nothing else, exciting. Or even just excited. Either way, there's energy. Furi has nothing of the sort; it is a deadened trod through slightly ugly backgrounds and uglier character designs while Roger Rabbit over here keeps gabbing about who knows what to an unusually rendered model of the Team Fortress 2 scout who does not care. It is the same kind of lame didacticism that YouTube comment section bait like Virtual Insanity launders to pretend it has something interesting to say. Art is never about what you say. It's about how you say it. Having meaning and making me care that you have meaning are two very different tasks. It's never a question of grasping what Furi is going for, it's only a matter of holding on. It's so uncompelling that the whole thing is rendered effervescent. Words come and go, moments of pathos come and go, story beats come and go. Like whispers in the wind. It sucks!

But there's more to the game than the auto walk button. Though, y'know. Pre-rendered cutscenes? Look into it. I might not like looking at the game or listening to it (ok, the soundtrack is pretty good, if a touch overrated), but there's one more sense that matters, and it trumps the rest of the experience. I adore how this game feels.

I'm addicted to attack patterns. When people tell me a boss fight in a game requires 'rote memorisation', I start clapping my hands like a toddler. Something about the learning process, mastery over an enemy in a game, is the peak of satisfaction to me. That's all this game has to offer me, encounter-wise—peak satisfaction.

Every boss falls somewhere in this excellent spectrum between a twin-stick bullet hell and a rhythm game hack-and-parry, with nearly any individual point on it working just as well as any other. Tekken battle vs. a lightning-fast ninja requiring snap reflexes and free jazz rhythms? Great! 5-phase Enter The Gungeon robot fight with a zillion projectiles? Awesome! Invisible sniper rifle lady who runs away from you for an hour? Fantasti- ok, that one was annoying, but still. Cool! Every fight is electrifying in completely new ways, and it's exciting to see the game continually top itself while maintaining a very consistent difficulty curve (with one kinda clever diegetic drop-off). With most boss rush games, people seem to prefer the 'epic highs and lows of high school football' approach, but I love a clean on-ramp.

And a quick aside: what a clever way to have six or seven-phase boss fights! They've cracked a way for the learning to happen without a game over. Regenerating one life after a successful phase makes mistakes much less frustrating and makes a clean run-through after a game over much more consistent. But them healing to full after you lose a life means you'll never lose the satisfaction of earning progress. You leave this game with that same ecstatic rush you do something like Sekiro, and the knowledge if you had to fight any of these bosses again right now, you could probably beat them on the first try. It's just the best sensation, and now there's much less repetition required to get you there. Even the visuals feel more satisfying in motion, the crackle of the sword reflecting your performance, the shonen slow motion parry, it all starts to sing! Man, I wish this story wasn't so empty.

(touches my hand to my sports commentator earpiece)

Oh. Wow! Really?

This just in, I'm so sorry folks, I was completely wrong. This game does have a theme. How could I have been so blind? Bugs Bunny over there is his inner voice! Like his conscience! And the whole game was actually about learning to trust your conscience! Sparkle on! Its Wednesday! Don't forget to be yourself! You were right YouTube comments, this game's story is great!

If you're thinking I'm being a bit harsh, you're right. There is nothing I like more than being really mean to a game I thoroughly enjoyed playing. But there is nothing I hate more than self-seriousness without purpose. Imagine if the terrible dialogue and one-sided monologues weren't there. Imagine if the didactic hammer swings of capital C Commentary were traded for any subtlety. Imagine if the grandiose self-seriousness was in service of Commentary, which actually had meat on its bones. Imagine if the devs of this 10/10 compilation of character action game fights didn't feel the need to impose a malformed ""indie game"" story onto their thunderous euphoria. It would be so much better! I should QA for every game. This is how we save the art form.




And yes, Virtual Insanity fucking sucks. 

I don't know, man. There's plenty to like here—charming characters, a cute story, semi-compelling political drama, good (enough) maps, gorgeous GBA aesthetic, whatever. But I've been frustrated and dragging my feet playing this. There is a tiny little fence between me and having fun, and no matter what I do, I cannot hop over it and be compelled to finish this game. That fence is named Seth.

Let me be clear. Lovely guy. Seems really sweet. But he is a sponge on the hypothalamus of my brain. He sucks up every drop of serotonin produced while playing this game. Instead of pumping my fist and shaking hands with another comically muscular man before we ride in a helicopter and are tricked into a death battle with a technologically superior alien species that only one of us escapes alive, I'm sucking my thumb and honk-shooing in my nightcap and gown beside a brick-and-mortar fireplace. Seth is the single most overpowered character I have ever seen in any video game. Still, with like 5 or 6 chapters left in the entire game, he one-shots every normal enemy and two-shots every boss. What are we doing here? Seth bends the very map design around him. Choke-points are no longer threatening. I stand slack-jawed as I drop the red-haired menace in front of 300 enemy goons, praying they will be enough to end his reign. Yet he stands steadfast as they all line up and take turns missing every attack and dying instantly. The Australian government cannot produce enough iron lances to feed into the Seth-powered enemy chipper. He is less a man and more an industrial machine.

Seth has ruined the thrill of permadeath. He has ruined my investment in the combat. He has stolen my crops, and he has pillaged my coffers. I never want to see this man again!

There is a lot to be said about how novel the pacing of this game is and how much I enjoy saving only at the end of chapters (and the chapter structure itself), but I'll save it for when I actually finish one of these things.

Irrefutably antiquated but how on earth is that supposed to be a pejorative? Games aren't this unencumbered anymore. Visions aren't this uncompromised. When was the last time you played a platformer with this kind of rhythm, this much palpable momentum? I'm obsessed with the way things move. I've found myself drawn to platformers my entire life. They are one of the few arts that explore the beauty of motion. Playing this game is like looking into the inside of a watch, seeing all of the minuscule gears twist and turn in perfect rhythmic synchronicity. And there you are, a being of glorious human error trying desperately to survive. If gameplay is commentary then Crash Bandicoot has more to say about the sordid merciless momentum of life than anything I've ever seen try to communicate it through dialogue.

I've had a pretty strange relationship with difficulty in games. For the longest time, my brain simply rejected games of a certain ilk. If I'm not progressing often then I'm not having fun, and the higher the difficulty the more likely I am to be doing the same stuff time and again. That's boring. It's that simple. But eventually, I realised it was all about mindset. Difficulty can be incredibly fun if it makes room for mastery. It shifts the progress from the external to the internal. This was the shift required for me to get into FromSoft's games last year. I will game over and repeat large sections of levels, but I relish that when I redo earlier parts I'll blow through them to a degree I'd have previously thought impossible. The finish line is all the more satisfying when you know you've earned it. Few games make this experience so rewarding.

The level design is blatantly experimental. As embryotic as all 3D platformers of this decade are, this one feels far more alien. For every idea your Mario 64s of the world ingrained into the lexicon of the genre forever more, there is a level of Crash Bandicoot no one would ever again have the balls to try for. You'd have to be crazy to think you could pull off a 'The High Road' in a 2024 platformer. But here it is. Unreal! In many ways, it still feels futuristic. I can't name another platformer where your depth perception is a skill the game finds worth testing (not to be confused with games that test your depth perception because they fuck up the camera placement), and this game builds many levels around it. Initially, this game can feel like one big reaction time test, but the longer you play the more you learn it's about ingratiating yourself into its flow. If Sekiro is secretly a rhythm game then this is Space Channel 5. Part 2. It isn't offering you ways to play it. It's a sergeant barking an endlessly wonderful song of orders.

There are many things to say about this as remake, most of which I'll save for after I've played all three games. But the biggest feather in this version's cap has to be Stormy Ascent. For a bonus, cutting room floor, "too hard and too long," DLC level, it is the perfect ending to the game. A necessary payoff to every lesson you've learned and skill you've acquired. The experience would be incomplete without it.

I find the idea of 100%-ing this game at once cumbersome and totally insane but it's so good I may do it anyway. Either way, Any% (+ Stormy Ascent) is such a phenomenal experience that I am more than comfortable counting anything else as a bonus.

If you call this "imprecise" in your review, see me after class.